Hollywood

AI is going to transform Hollywood But it won't be the horror story everyone's afraid of.

- By Katie Notopoulos. Ilustrations by Sandro Rybak

AN ODD NEW EPISODE OF South Park began floating around Twitter last summer. The characters and setting looked familiar, and the voices were almost right, but something was slightly off. In the episode, Eric Cartman is disappointed that Hollywood actors have gone on strike. He creates a deep fake app that can put any actor's likeness into any movie and, with a friend, pitches it to Marc Andreessen. They also attempt to recruit Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, only to discover the actors are heading to Mars with Elon Musk.

The mini-episode was not made by the South Park creators but by a company called Fable Simulation, which lifted assets from the long-running animated series to showcase its new generative AI tool. Called Showrunner AI, it can write, direct, edit, and voice episodes of a show with just a little prompting. Unsurprisingly, there was a mixed reaction to the demo, which came out just a few weeks after the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike, partly over how AI might be used in Hollywood.

The fake episode isn't "funny," exactly - nor is it worth watching by anyone uninterested in Fable's tech. Even so, it represents the deepest fears that Hollywood creatives and the general public have about AI: that in the near future, we'll all be watching synthetic entertainment generated as cheaply as possible by the studios and networks, written by robots and acted out by computer-generated versions of beloved stars, a hollow and ersatz version of the films we loved.